1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a substitute printing technology.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the known art, if a printing apparatus experiences a failure that disables it from outputting print jobs and the print jobs need to be printed by a substitute printing apparatus, all print jobs that have been transmitted to the failing printing apparatus from the host computer and whose execution in the printing apparatus has not been confirmed are printed by the substitute printing apparatus, as described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 07-225660. However, a substitute printing method where the copies of all print jobs held in the host computer are transmitted to a substitute printing apparatus has a problem such that the print jobs that have already been transmitted to the failing printing apparatus are also printed out by the substitute printing apparatus.
Some printing apparatuses have a function for deleting the received print jobs in the host computer if a failure occurs. Nevertheless, some pages of a print job that is suspended due to a failure in the printing apparatus are inevitably printed in duplicate by the substitute printing apparatus even if the pages have already been printed by the failing printing apparatus.